Naheed Mangi, 70, was convicted earlier this year of intentional damage to a protected computer. Prosecutors say that after being fired, she changed the database by replacing patient information with gibberish and childish insults like, “doctor too stupid.”

While the incident happened in 2013, Mangi wasn’t indicted until 2018, and wasn’t convicted until a jury trial last February, records show. Prosecutors asked for a 10-month sentence to be split between jail and house arrest, but instead Senior U.S. District Judge Edward J. Davila sentenced Mangi to probation.

Her attorney argued in court that no time in custody was a just outcome.

“Notably, for the seven years since her arrest, Ms. Mangi has complied with her conditions of release. She is 70 years old and has lived at the same address for the past 28 years,” a defense sentencing memo says. “Ms. Mangi is currently unemployed, living a solitary life on her social security and savings.”

Mangi must pay $10,520.69 in restitution, court records show.

Mangi was working on a Stanford University study, sponsored by Genentech, testing a new, experimental pharmaceutical treatment for breast cancer. Prosecutors argued her actions betrayed the trust of patients who agreed to participate in the study, and that it was motivated by Mangi’s hurt feelings from being fired.

The early part of LaBarbera’s Sunday shift is peacefully spent capturing, banding and releasing birds in what they call a “little oasis of trees.” But around 9:00 am every week, their team of volunteers hears a cacophony of car horns from I-880, less than half a mile to the east.

“You become really aware of the noise when you get away from it for a little bit,” said LaBarbera, a science director at the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory.

The Bay Area is a permanent or temporary home for 250 different species of resident and migratory birds. Noise can affect their stress response, interfere with their ability to listen for predators and prey, and alter their vocalizations. But for conservationists striving to preserve the region’s threatened bird populations, disturbance from traffic, airplane and other noise is an unavoidable backdrop—and one that, until recently, has been little studied.

“I realized we knew hardly anything about how birds respond to noise pollution,” he says.

Scientists’ understanding of the impact of urban noise on birds advanced during the COVID-19 pandemic, however. When the Bay Area shut down in March 2020, researchers like Jennifer Phillips — then working with Francis through a National Science Foundation Fellowship — had been studying the songs of white-crowned sparrows in San Francisco and Richmond. They were able to record how the songs changed when the noise subsided. In a paper published in Science magazine, they reported that male sparrows sang more quietly and used lower frequencies when not having to compete with traffic noise.

But the pandemic’s muting of urban noise is long gone. And while the wetland birds of the South Bay don’t sing, they have to compete with urban sounds when they use vocalizations to communicate with each other and ward off predators.

The South Bay’s Salt Pond Restoration Project — the largest tidal restoration effort on the West Coast — provides habitat to the threatened Ridgway’s rail, an elusive species of bird that spends most of its time hiding in the tidal marsh where it nests. The project area also hosts about 10 percent of the population of endangered western snowy plovers. These tiny shorebirds now depend on the salt ponds and tidal flats — as well as on their normal habitat of sandy beaches — for nesting and foraging.

But the salt ponds are located directly under flight paths from Oakland Airport and Moffett Federal Airfield. Nearby highways and Union Pacific railroad tracks mean birds in the project area are constantly impacted by noise from planes, trains and automobiles.

Chronic noise “shrinks an animal’s perpetual word,” Francis said. When noise increases, the distance over which birds can hear sounds reduces.

While the effect of noise on rail species has not been studied directly, they vocalize at fairly low frequencies, which transportation noise tends to drown out.

Plovers, on the other hand, may be more sensitive to sudden noises. A large truck zooming by an otherwise quiet area, a barking dog or a cellphone ringing can create the illusion of a threat, causing birds to react.

“Episodic or intermittent noise is, I think, a bigger deal for wildlife than something steady or constant like highway noise or a data center or whatever else,” said Dave Halsing, project manager of the Salt Pond Restoration Project.

Francis recalls baby plovers on the Oceano Dunes near Pismo Beach on the Central Coast spending their nights darting away from their habitats, disturbed by off-road vehicles. The inexperienced chicks interpret the noise as an immediate threat and expend energy trying to evade it.

Still, Bay Area ornithologists and bird lovers are preoccupied with addressing more immediate threats of habitat destruction from further development, which means noise pollution is a lower priority.

“In conservation, we’re usually worried about the absolute emergency situation,” LaBarbera said.

Urban noise isn’t going away, but small changes can make a difference. Francis points to the growing number of cities enacting leaf blower regulations, which while they are often aimed at curbing emissions also help to reduce noise pollution. Switching to electric vehicles, choosing tire materials that generate less road noise, and adopting quieter jet engines can all help.

Managers of the Salt Pond Restoration Project are doing their part, taking steps to reduce noise in their own construction work when making trails or fortifying levees to reduce flood risk. They try to use less intrusive construction equipment, such as vibratory pile drivers. Halsing said the project is also required to implement buffer zones of several hundred feet between their construction work and certain species, including rails.

It’s a time-honored practice in conservation: Working for wildlife, while keeping one’s distance.

Exoplanet VHS 1256b, located 40 light years away from Earth, was identified in 2015. The planet has a similar volume as Jupiter but is 10 to 20 times its mass, earning it the super-Jupiter or brown dwarf title — smaller than a star, and similar to gas giant planets. This particular exoplanet quickly captured astronomers’ attention with its extreme variations in brightness.

RELATED: The upcoming Pandora Mission is the Bay Area’s latest contribution to the search for life on other planets

Most objects in space appear to blink, due either to physical changes within the planet or star, or external factors. For super-Jupiter exoplanets, Zhang said, this change in brightness is usually minimal, hovering at 1 to 2%. But on VHS 1256b, brightness variations neared 40%, the largest ever recorded for an object of its size.

The mystery made it a target for researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope to directly image exoplanets. One of those researchers was UCSC astronomer Andrew Skemer, who is a co-principal investigator of the James Webb Space Telescope Early Release Science program.

In 2023, Skemer and his former graduate student Brittany Miles co-authored a paper revealing the chemical makeup of the planet’s atmosphere, home to silicate clouds made of sand-like crystals that are vaporized and then condensed. Still, questions remained. Most notably, scientists wondered how these clouds were distributed across the planet, and whether they could account for the huge fluctuations in brightness.

Zhang, who had been studying planetary atmospheres for years, wanted to find out. He used a modified version of a general circulation model — a computer program commonly used to model Earth’s atmosphere and climate dynamics — to create a simulation of VHS 1256b’s atmosphere. He and his research team experimented with different versions of their model, trying to create one that would replicate the observed brightness changes.

The team was working on the assumption that the distant exoplanet had key similarities to Jupiter. At most wavelengths of light, Jupiter, like its distant brown dwarf cousins, had a 1 to 2% brightness variability. But, at a certain wavelength, that variability jumped to 20%. That represented the planet’s famous Great Red Spot, a storm roughly the size of the Earth. So, Zhang thought, maybe VHS 1256b has some kind of great red spot, too. They tried to create a model with some kind of big storm, but struck out.

“We tried, but we cannot,” Zhang said. “No way, we just cannot get it right. And so we got puzzled.”

Zhang and his team eventually had to consider the possibility that the exoplanet was, in some way, fundamentally different from Jupiter. Jupiter rotates much faster than Earth, its days lasting only nine hours. Zhang had been modeling VHS 1256b in a similar way, with fast rotation and short days. This fast rotation doesn’t allow storms or clouds to grow large. Instead, the force from the speedy rotation causes clouds to form into the neat bands and spots that can be seen on Jupiter. Zhang decided to see what would happen if he slowed down the model’s rotation.

“We said, ‘OK, why not?’ We’ll just try slow rotation,” Zhang said. “And when we try slow rotation, magic happens.”

In the slow rotating simulation, Zhang saw massive clouds of dust form across the planet’s surface. The clouds were unstable, forming and dissipating over time. Dust plumes were dredged from below into the atmosphere by the planet’s heat, which is much higher than Jupiter’s, and could form small cloud patches or global dust storms.

In the end, Zhang’s simulation showed that VHS 1256b is not as similar to Jupiter as scientists expected. The planet rotates once every 22 hours, compared to Jupiter’s nine. It is also much hotter — while Jupiter sits at around 128 Kelvin, or -224 degrees Fahrenheit, VHS 1256b is about 1,300 Kelvin or 1,880 degrees Fahrenheit. The planet’s turbulent clouds reminded Zhang not of Jupiter, but of Mars’ chaotic, unpredictable dust storms.

“I feel quite surprised,” Zhang said. “This has nothing to do with Mars, right? It’s super different, but its actual physical mechanism could be the same.”

These enormous and ever-evolving dust clouds explain the planet’s mysterious dips and spikes in brightness. Zhang believes the phenomenon could be present on other exoplanets, too.

“I think this is very strong evidence to show that silicate clouds cause brightness changes, at least for this object,” Zhang said. “But I believe it’s universal.”

This kind of research could revolutionize scientists’ understanding of planetary atmospheres. Before astronomers could directly observe exoplanets, they were limited to studying our own solar system’s eight planets. Now, with the James Webb Space Telescope and direct imaging exoplanet programs, scientists are able to dive into atmospheric dynamics that have never been observed.

For Zhang, the next step is to gather more information about other super-Jupiters to see if they follow similar patterns. Perhaps, he said, there will be a predictable correlation between brightness variation and rotation period that has to do with silicate dust clouds. VHS 1256b could end up as a point on a graph showing a clear relationship between the two factors.

“I would be very much happy to see that happen,” Zhang said, “but nature always surprises us.”

Zhang also thinks silicate dust clouds could play a significant role in a decades-long mystery known as the L/T Transition, a stage in brown dwarf or super-Jupiter planets when their temperatures are around 1,400 Kelvin or above, appear red. Somewhere between 1,400 and 1,200 Kelvin, there is an abrupt transition, and planets with temperatures below this threshold appear blue. This sharp change indicates a sudden change in the planets’ atmospheres at that temperature threshold, Zhang said, and nobody knows why.

VHS 1256b, sitting just above that temperature boundary at 1,300 Kelvin, is red. After discovering more about its atmosphere and its massive dust storms, Zhang thinks dust likely plays a significant role in this red to blue transition. Maybe, he hypothesized, these massive dust storms dissipate when temperatures drop to 1,200 Kelvin, causing the atmosphere to appear more clear.

“Unfortunately, no one has confirmed this hypothesis,” Zhang said. “But I think there’s a smoking gun.”

The 13-month Pandora Mission will attempt to capture the atmospheric conditions of 20 planets as they eclipse their respective suns, an effort to aid the James Webb Space Telescope’s photographing of planets orbiting vibrant, young stars.

The Pandora team is hoping to find biosignatures — chemicals that can only be produced by a living organism such as oxygen, carbon dioxide and methane — which provide evidence of past or present life, though the chance of finding those gases is almost infinitely small, said Peter McGill, an optical astronomer on the Pandora Mission. But data gathered in the project could help answer some of humanity’s biggest questions.

“Are we alone? How do we search for life?” McGill said. “To detect something like a biosignature, or to look for life, you need to really have a good measurement of the atmosphere of your exoplanet. And to do that, you need to understand the star.”

The Pandora mission will be the first satellite launched into space as part of the Pioneers Program – a name that serves as an homage to NASA’s original Pioneers Programs that explored planets in our solar system – that will expand the horizons of the original program to capture information from planets 100 light years away. The targeted planets are all hosts of young stars, which are difficult to capture via telescope because of “solar contamination” — unwanted signals from a star that create false data.

“This is the first full NASA science mission that we have managed for this kind of spacecraft,” said Ben Bahney, leader of the LLNL Space Program. “It’s a culmination of at least six or seven years of direct effort, from proposal all the way through to launch.”

Before scientists understood the limits of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to cut through solar contamination, LLNL scientists were conceiving of the Pandora mission as a fix, said Jordan Karburn, engineer of small satellite capabilities for the Pandora Mission. Karburn said the LLNL scientists had previously worked on space telescopes like Hubble and Kepler, so they were conscious of the potential limitations.

“The core members of the (LLNL) science leadership team knew that stellar contamination was going to be problematic, and they sort of tailor-made this small satellite mission, i.e. Pandora, to help address this problem,” Karburn said.

Pandora works like this: while planets floating in the void of space are too dark for telescopes to capture, astronomers can take photos of exoplanets as they cross the face of a star, Karburn said. Scientists then use a spectrometer, a tool which measures the wave lengths of light from the makeup of a planet, revealing its unique chemical fingerprint. Put simply, it’s addition by subtraction.

“With Pandora, we can then combine this data with James Webb, remove the noise from the spectrum and learn robust properties about exoplanets,” Karburn said.

While Pandora’s primary goal is to abet the understanding of exoplanets, its secondary goal is showing the capability of public partnerships with commercial space-faring companies for space exploration. NASA’s reputation for creating huge engineering feats also comes at great expense, Karburn said.

But Pandora represents a “new class” of mission to create new scientific capabilities at a fraction of the cost — seven times less than what NASA had initially estimated, according to the Pandora team.

“Things like (the James Webb telescope) are $10 billion-plus missions, right? So NASA is used to spending an incredible amount of money to drive totally unique capabilities in space,” Bahney said. “The (Pandora) instrument alone is about seven times cheaper than what NASA says that it should be… One of our biggest ‘fights,’ so to speak, was convincing NASA that it was credible because we were so under budget.”

The Pandora Mission satellite will be packed onto a SpaceX rocket in early January with a payload of 21 other satellites for a variety of commercial and scientific endeavor. While the official launch date for the Pandora Mission rocket has not yet been announced – a deliberate choice to protect national security — it is expected to leave the Vandenberg Space Force base some time after Jan. 5. Upon leaving Earth’s atmosphere, the SpaceX rocket will release Pandora, and the LLNL team will commission the small satellite to glimpse into space for signs of life among the stars.

“This is a major undertaking, and the fact that we’re now ready for launch is extremely exciting,” Bahney said. “There’s a really significant potential here for Pandora to have a huge science impact.”

When the board was fixed, he loaded the plastic into the blue recycling bin outside of his house, but the next morning the bin had not been emptied. The city recycling plant wouldn’t accept the material because it was a non-recyclable kind of plastic.

“I started talking to my buddies and we realized this was an industry-wide problem. There’s so much waste generated from building surfboards,” said Guerrero, who is now CEO at Swellcycle, a Santa Cruz company that creates 3D printed surfboards from renewable materials.

Guerrero has always been interested in building environmentally friendly products. In high school, he converted a 1972 Volkswagen Beetle into an electric vehicle. Later he gained a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s in design and manufacturing. Guerrero 3D-printed his first prototype board less than a year after his surfboard broke, marking the beginning of what would become Swellcycle, which aims to turn the tides on surfing’s harmful impact on the planet.

Traditionally, surfboards begin their lives as a large rectangular block of rigid polyurethane foam — a type of plastic made from fossil fuels that can’t be easily recycled. The blocks are carved away to form the desired surfboard shape, generating a large amount of waste.

Oil-based plastics like polyurethane are terrible for the environment. In fact, the carbon emissions from manufacturing a typical six-foot surfboard are equivalent to one person flying 1,005 miles on a long-haul flight, according to a 2022 report from Wavechanger, an Australian organization dedicated to reducing the harmful environmental impacts of surfing.

Some newer foam materials that use fewer fossil fuels have gained popularity, but these alternatives break down easily into tiny pieces of plastic that can harm ocean wildlife.

“Imagine the contents of a beanbag,” said Tom Wilson, founder of Wavechanger. “If you break a surfboard in half and rub it just slightly, the beads fall off.”

Those beads can be swallowed by seabirds and other marine animals, leading to internal injuries, intestinal blockages, and even death.

“You see photos of birds that have their stomachs opened after they pass away, and they’re full of plastic,” Wilson said.

Instead of nonrenewable materials, Swellcycle boards are built from polylactic acid (PLA), a biodegradable plastic made from fermented corn starch and sugarcane. In addition to being eco-friendly, surfboards made from PLA are stronger and lighter than typical foam boards.

To combat the waste created by the typical carving process, Swellcycle uses specialized 3D printers to print their boards with the minimum amount of PLA. The company builds its own printers — giant rectangular boxes standing taller than their operators — to methodically print the boards layer by layer.

The cores of the boards are printed using a lattice pattern, strengthening the board while keeping it light enough to maneuver easily. Once the day-long printing process is finished, the only excess material created is the support that props up the board, which the company recycles into new products.

Traditional surfboards are simply thrown away once their time is done, but with Swellcycle boards, the PLA is ground into pellets which can be used to make new products.

Every part of a Swellcycle board can be recycled, apart from the resin used to coat the boards and make them durable. When heated, resin burns instead of melting, so the Swellcycle team is now working on methods to convert excess resin into fins, which jut out on surfboards to help with steering and control.

“We used to see trash as just a problem, but trash is so precious. We can make so many things if we are creative,” said Lili Van Hassel, sustainability and operations lead at Swellcycle.

Swellcycle’s zero-waste approach combats what’s known as the “surfer’s paradox,” in which surfers, who are often avid environmentalists, actively participate in practices that harm the natural world.

“Before Swellcycle, there was a disconnect between surfers that love the ocean and want to protect it from pollution and climate change, but the equipment that they were riding was directly contributing to the very thing they’re trying to prevent,” Guerrero said.

The true test for a surfboard is how it performs on the waves, however. At one of the company’s “demo days” in October, where local surfers tested out the boards for the first time in Santa Cruz, they held their own.

“It was very cool. I like that it was stiff, had a lot of drive, and went fast,” said Jason Glickman, a Santa Cruz resident who has been surfing for more than 30 years.

Ricardo Urbinas, another local surfer, urged the surfing community to take a more active part in protecting the oceans that they love.

“We really have to be good stewards of the ocean,” Urbinas said. “As much as we like to surf, I think we all understand some of the impact that building surfboards has.”

Swellcycle’s boards were recently named “Earth & Sea Invention of the Year” by the Seymour Marine Discovery Center at UC Santa Cruz. Guerrero hopes that other sports manufacturing companies beyond surfing see Swellcycle’s success as a blueprint of how to reduce the environmental impact of equipment production.

“Our wish is that people are excited about this as we are and we can do this all over the world,” Guerrero said.

Fox, the 55-year-old co-founder of recreational swim group Kelp Krawlers, was far ahead of more than a dozen swimmers returning to Lovers Point beach in Pacific Grove early Sunday afternoon, but never came ashore.

Marine biologist Chris Lowe, director of the Shark Lab at California State University, Long Beach, said the rocky coastline near Lovers Point attracts sea lions, and seals also frequent the waters offshore. Both are primary prey for white sharks.

Large white sharks, which can reach nearly 21 feet in length, migrate from offshore in the Pacific to the coast in October to bulk up on seals and sea lions, typically remaining through January.

“They will hunt and they will patrol off these areas where these animals congregate,” Lowe said.

At around 12:15 p.m. Sunday, a driver at a stop sign on his way to work called 911 to report seeing a shark burst out of the water about 100 yards off Lovers Point with what he believed to be a human protruding from its mouth, U.S. Coast Guard petty officer Charlie Valor said Tuesday. The man said the shark re-entered the water and did not resurface, Valor added. Pacific Grove police Commander Brian Anderson said a second witness also reported seeing a shark breach the water in that area.

No remains have been recovered, nor has anyone reported finding any of the gear Fox was wearing while swimming, Anderson said.

A buoy near Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station at Cabrillo Point a little over a mile from Lovers Point collects pings from tagged white sharks passing by, and has recorded five swimming within about 500 yards in December, including the two in the past week. But marine biologist Barbara Block, whose lab oversees the tracking project, noted that Lovers Point is outside the range of that buoy. And tagged sharks represent only a fraction of the animals in the region, making it impossible to link a specific shark to the incident Sunday, Block said.

If Fox was taken by a white shark without leaving a trace, “that would need to be a big shark,” Lowe said.

Since 1950, sharks have killed 16 people in California, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. All were determined to be white sharks except in one case, in Point Reyes National Seashore in October 2023, where the species was not confirmed.

In the Monterey area, 13 people have been bitten by white sharks since 1950, resulting in two deaths, nine major injuries and two minor injuries. Most victims were divers or surfers; only two swimmers have been attacked.

Sunday’s disappearance marks the third shark-related incident at Lovers Point since June 2022, when another Kelp Krawler, Steve Bruemmer, was bitten and seriously injured while swimming. Two months later, a paddleboarder and his dog were thrown from their board but unhurt when a shark bit it from below.

Shark attacks generally appear to fall into three categories — predatory, accidental and defensive — though the reason behind any specific incident is often unclear, Lowe said. The rarity of attacks suggests white sharks do not view humans as prey.

“We’re clearly not on the menu,” Lowe said. “Otherwise people would be bitten and eaten all the time.”

Some incidents may occur when sharks mistake humans for prey, Lowe said.

Experts cautioned that the ocean remains a wilderness, with both risks and rewards.

“You can get hurt,” Lowe said, but “the more you know, the safer you can be.”

Lovers Point, a rocky promontory along scenic Ocean View Boulevard with two small crescents of beach beside it, was featured as one of the state’s top swimming spots in the 2024 book Places We Swim California. The book described Lovers Point as especially popular among swimmers in winter.

“Cheerful regulars, dressed in neoprene caps and gloves, brave the icy water for their daily dopamine release,” the book by Australians Caroline Clements and Dillon Seitchik-Reardon said.

Clement in an email Tuesday noted that she and Seitchik-Reardon live in Sydney.

“Like in California we understand swimming comes with risks and sharks are out there in the water,” Clements said. “It’s so rare that someone gets bitten but it is a reality. Lovers Point is a beautiful spot loved by many, which is why we included it, and I hope this doesn’t deter people from swimming there.”

People entering near-shore waters should be mindful of the times of year and locations where white sharks are more common, and should pay attention to the presence of prey animals such as elephant seals, harbor seals and sea lions, Lowe said.

Swimming close to others can reduce risk, he said. “Your probability of being bitten is lower if you’re in a group.”

Remaining in shallower water may also lower the chance of an encounter, as white sharks typically attack from below. Deep water “gives the animal the ability to investigate something from below,” Lowe said.

Authorities on Monday afternoon suspended the search for Fox after about 15 hours of air and water operations involving the U.S. Coast Guard, Pacific Grove police, Monterey County Sheriff’s Office divers and Monterey firefighters.

On the exterior wall of a house in Castroville, a newly installed sensor glows green with an important message: It’s safe to go outside. For Maribel Martínez, a farmworker and mother living here, the information is crucial. Two of her children have asthma, and knowing when the air is hazardous to breathe is important for protecting their health.

“I always tell them to check the monitor before going out,” she said. “They know that if the monitor is red, we don’t go outside. We close the doors and shut the windows.”

Martínez’s sensor is one of several recently installed to monitor air pollution in Pajaro Valley by scientists at UC Santa Cruz. The work is part of a larger research project using drone flights and new monitoring technologies to better understand when and where farmworkers are most severely exposed to air pollution.

Farmworkers like Martinez are grappling with extreme heat, pesticide exposure, and air pollution. To avoid the hottest hours of the day, they start early, getting out to the fields at dawn when it is cooler. But avoiding overheating in the face of rising temperatures is also exposing farmworkers to higher levels of air pollution.

“The folks contributing the least to climate change are the ones bearing the most of the brunt,” said UC Santa Cruz professor Javier González-Rocha.

Communities in Pajaro Valley face pollutants including microscopic particles called PM2.5 and ground level ozone. PM2.5, which comes from sources like wildfire smoke and vehicle exhausts, can penetrate deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream, triggering asthma and worsening heart disease.

Ground level ozone forms as a result of interactions between vehicle and industrial emissions and volatile organic compounds, chemicals in the air that come from a variety of sources, including pesticides. It can damage airways when inhaled.

Using drones to measure levels of pollution at different altitudes, Javier González-Rocha found a concerning pattern. During the dawn and dusk, prime work times for farmworkers avoiding heat, cooler temperatures allow clouds of pollutants to drift downwards. The result: Pollution levels at ground level are higher.

“Starting work earlier is an imperfect solution. It’s removing the worker from one risk, but it’s exposing them to another,” said González-Rocha, who’s leading a project at UCSC to close air monitoring gaps directly south of Santa Cruz.

Back in Castroville, he points over to a high school in the distance where students are playing soccer. A sinking haze of pollution can just be made out in the glare from the stadium lights.

For González-Rocha, the work has personal significance. The son of immigrant farmworkers, he grew up playing in the fields of Pajaro Valley while his parents labored. This upbringing inspired him to use his Ph.D. in aerospace engineering to research and improve air pollution monitoring for farmworker communities.

Sensors installed by the UCSC team, like the one at Martinez’s house, help residents know when pollution levels are high. But before González-Rocha and his colleagues started installing them, there was a large monitoring gap in the Pajaro Valley, compared to neighboring wealthier cities like Santa Cruz and Monterey.

To address that gap, González-Rocha partnered with Adrian Ayala, a local community advocate and former board president of the North Monterey Unified School District, to reach families in the valley and offer sensor installation. They set up a meeting with community members to explain how the sensors worked and why measuring pollution mattered.

Their efforts were met with hesitancy from some families — installing sensors required Ayala to enter homes for installation, and some families had privacy concerns around providing data to the sensors.

But slowly and surely, community members came around. Ayala reassured families that no personal information would be collected and that the air monitors would help detect pollution in the area. Since April, he has installed seven sensors around the region with plans for more.

Ayala stressed the importance of not just providing sensors, but educating families about how to use them.

“The goal is to also train them so that this project doesn’t end here. They learn, and from here on out, they can start installing sensors,” he said.

But difficulties still exist. The monitors installed so far are PurpleAir sensors, a proprietary brand that requires Wi-Fi and a power source to work.

“A lot of people here don’t have Wi-Fi,” Martínez said. “I was close to discontinuing my internet. It’s very expensive.” Without connection to Wi-Fi, PurpleAir monitors can’t transmit data.

So González-Rocha and a team of undergraduate students at UCSC are developing new, low-cost sensors that don’t need Wi-Fi to work.

The new sensors use long-range radio to send their recorded data to a central receiver node. Once that node, the only part of the system that needs Wi-Fi, receives the data, it can transmit the data back to the team.

The sensors also come equipped with solar panels, meaning they don’t need to be plugged in and can be placed anywhere, such as in the middle of a field. González-Rocha and Ayala hope to start installing the versatile, low-cost monitors in the coming year.

“The question was how do we come up with a solution that places the user at the center, because if we create a fancy tool but it’s not compatible with the user, then we’ve failed,” González-Rocha said.

To help communities better understand air pollution and access data, Javier’s team has partnered with Regeneración, a nonprofit promoting community climate action in Pajaro Valley. The nonprofit has run focus groups and listening sessions to better understand what challenges residents have in understanding air pollution data.

This outreach is crucial, said Eloy Ortiz, special projects manager at Regeneración. “A lot of these folks are in survival mode,” he said. “They’re thinking about how to get the rent paid, how to get food on the table. They’re not necessarily thinking about air quality.”

For Martínez, the work is already having an impact, giving her and her sons peace of mind. “For us, it’s important because there’s a lot we don’t know,” she said. “But now we’re talking about air quality, and we’re looking after our health a bit more.”

The Bay Area’s commercial crab-fishing season can begin Jan. 5, state officials announced Friday, now that many humpback whales have safely made their way down the coast.

The decision came after a series of delays since November meant to protect migrating whales from getting tangled in fishing lines, and it came with a key restriction: Fleets will have to operate under a 40% trap reduction.

“Setting the opening date of the Dungeness crab fishery is never easy,” Charlton H. Bonham, director of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, said in a statement. “The commercial Dungeness crab fishery is inherently complex, and careful consideration is required to ensure we are supporting California’s fishing communities while also reducing risk of entanglement of whales and sea turtles off our coast.”

The state’s decision — made in consultation with representatives of the fishing industry, environmental organizations and scientists — will open up commercial crabbing from the Sonoma/Mendocino county line south to the Mexican border. Trap restrictions on recreational crabbers will be lifted Jan. 2.

For commercial crabbers, it’s a late but welcome start to a season that may end early. They will be allowed to drop crab pots on Jan. 2 but not pull them up until Jan. 5 at 12:01 a.m. If last season is any indication, they may get three months out of what would normally be a five-month season.

The season is likely to be even shorter in the far northern counties of Del Norte, Humboldt and Mendocino. The state has mandated a delay until at least Jan. 15 because of the presence of a toxin, called domoic acid, found in crab samples in those waters. Further testing will be conducted before a date is set.

Lisa Damrosch, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, said she welcomes the Jan. 5 news that will allow her organization’s members to get back to feeding the community as well as coastal economies, adding that she was pleased “the hard work by the fleet and the resulting reduction in entanglements has been recognized.”

Last season’s trap reduction was 50%.

Dr. Geoff Shester, a senior scientist for Oceana, said the state’s decision is “the right move” until safer pop-up gear becomes more prevalent. According to Oceana, about 75% of whale entanglements are fatal.

He noted that the state will likely need to shorten the upcoming season for conventional traps, as it did this year, The 2024-25 season opened late, on Jan. 18, 2025, and closed in late spring when whales were again on the move.

Since 2015, there have been delays in all but one commercial Dungeness season in the Bay Area, mostly because of whale entanglements. Domoic acid, which could sicken anyone who eats the tainted crab, destroyed Northern California’s 2015-2016 commercial season and created delays in other years.

Traditionally, California’s commercial season begins Nov. 15 and the recreational season earlier than that.

But while playing the recordings, the Saratoga High School senior recognized music patterns she had encountered while practicing piano sonatas.

Zhang listened to these recordings as part of collaboration with John Ryan, a senior research specialist studying ocean soundscapes at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and discovered structural similarities between whale songs and human sonatas. On Thursday, Zhang showcased their research as part of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) annual meeting in New Orleans.

The project started when Zhang decided to take her science studies out of the classroom. “I wanted a real-life application of the things I learned,” she said.

She turned to Ryan, her father’s longtime coworker — Ryan recalls hearing Zhang play piano in the background of work calls when she was only a child. When Zhang shared that she was interested in doing a research project with whales, Ryan sent her whale song recordings previously collected from underwater microphones in the Monterey Bay and simply asked her to listen to the sounds of ocean giants.

Ryan said Zhang “recognized the structure in a whale song that was really just like the structure of a sonata, which I didn’t know.”

Zhang discovered that, like human music, the whale songs had different sections. Three parts make up a sonata in human music: exposition, development and recapitulation.

“The exposition has a main theme that’s repeated in the third section. So, the first section and the third section are very similar, and the second section is the development—it’s a little bit more unique, and flows by itself,” Zhang said. The whale songs sections showed a similar pattern. Nestled between an introduction section and an ending, Zhang found a familiar pattern: exposition, development and recapitulation. “Her musical mind could immediately pick that out,” Ryan said.

Zhang and Ryan shared their findings with the broader scientific community at the AGU conference, which brings together more than 20,000 scientists to share discoveries ranging in topics from volcanoes to outer space. Zhang was accepted as part of the AGU’s BrightSTaRS program, which highlights research by middle school and high school students.

“Students get experience conducting research and then communicating that research through a poster that is displayed at the AGU annual meeting” said Michelle Nichols, Education Section representative for the AGU’s Annual Meeting Program committee. “It gives you the whole entire process of science from beginning to end, and I think it’s absolutely fantastic.” According to Nichols, Zhang’s poster will be displayed in the same hall as posters presented by professional scientists, on view for thousands of conference attendees.

Zhang says the experience has strengthened her passion for STEM and taught her about the complexities of whale song. “I think a lot of people don’t realize how musical they actually are. We think animals just make random noises, but they really have so much pattern and structure when you dig deep,” she said.

While most researchers presenting at the conference may worry about travel logistics and funding, Zhang faced a challenge familiar to any high school student: final exams. The conference landed during her exam week, leaving her unable to attend in person. Instead, she decided to present her whale song research virtually, a reminder that even promising scientists have to finish high school.

(CNN) — The Hubble Space Telescope and the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer have captured fresh images of an interstellar comet as the object nears its closest approach to Earth this month.

Comet 3I/ATLAS has intrigued astronomers because it originated outside of our solar system yet was discovered traveling through our celestial neighborhood in July.

Given that it’s only the third interstellar object ever observed zipping through our solar system, astronomers have directed numerous missions to focus on the comet. Observations have been critical in helping scientists determine the object’s trajectory and have even provided clues about its composition — as a result of the gases that sublimated from the comet during its closest pass by the sun in October.

Hubble was one of the first to observe 3I/ATLAS in July shortly after it was discovered, providing the most detailed view of the comet’s teardrop shape at the time.

Astronomers spotted 3I/ATLAS with Hubble again on November 30, when it was 178 million miles (286 million kilometers) from Earth, and using the telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 instrument, captured an even clearer shot.

Meanwhile, an image taken by the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or Juice, mission en route to study Jupiter and its icy moons, shows intriguing activity around the comet.

Spotting two tails

At the beginning of November, Juice was in a prime position to observe 3I/ATLAS from about 41 million miles (66 million kilometers) away from the comet.

Most of Juice’s data won’t arrive on Earth until February because the spacecraft is using its main antenna as a heat shield to protect it from the sun during its long journey to Jupiter. A smaller antenna is sending back data at a fraction of the rate.

The Juice team didn’t want to wait that long, so they downloaded a quarter of a single image taken by NavCam. The image shows heat-driven activity on the comet during its close pass by the sun.

The newly released image shows a coma, or a glowing halo of gas surrounding the comet, as well as two tails: a plasma tail composed of electrically charged gas, as well as a faint dust tail of solid particles being released.

Comets that originate in our solar system typically have both of these tails, as well as a hazy coma surrounding a solid core made of rock, gas, dust and ice leftover from the formation of the sun, planets or other celestial bodies. As comets approach stars like our sun, they heat up, forming tails of sublimating material that streak behind them.

Comet 3I/ATLAS will come within 167 million miles (270 million kilometers) of Earth on December 19, but it will be on the other side of the sun and poses no risk to our planet. For reference, Earth is about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) from the sun. The comet is expected to remain visible to telescopes and space missions for a few more months before exiting our solar system, according to NASA.

The rest of the Juice data from the comet’s flyby, expected between February 18 and 20, should include images from the spacecraft’s high-resolution optical camera, as well as composition and particle data that could provide more clues about where the interstellar object originated.

One last meteor shower for 2025

The next and final meteor shower of the year is the Ursids, expected to peak the night of December 21 into the early morning hours of December 22, according to the American Meteor Society and EarthSky.

The moon will be a barely visible waxing crescent, guaranteeing dark skies.

The meteor shower will peak during the winter solstice, or the official beginning of winter in the Northern Hemisphere when it is the farthest from the sun. The winter solstice marks the longest night of the year, creating the perfect opportunity for sky-gazers.